Not the Girl Next Door

15102012

Let’s go back in time, to the 1940s. Depending on your age, you may or may not know that the populace was still using pens – tubes filled with ink – to record information. That’s right, folks, there were no computers. No blogs. And blissfully, no Facebook. The difficulty with pens at that time, however, was their tendency to be rather messy and for that reason blotters were used to, er, blot up excess ink from your document to prevent smudges. Many companies jumped on this opportunity to hawk their wares to almost everybody, and thousands of inexpensive cardboard blotters were produced with eye-catching designs. Since the WWII era continued the pin-up art of previous decades, this was also utilized by advertisers depending upon their target audience. (Guys are SO predictable). The blotter shown here is such an example, though void of any company info which suggests it may have been offered as a gift from an entertainment venue. Apparently the subject is Cleopatra, but the historical inaccuracies compete with each other as fiercely as Caesar and M. Antony, who are shown here hurling tomatoes at each other.